Its here...

Well... The PS3 has finally arrived in Japan. Unsurprisingly, there are problems emerging, the first of which seems to be backwards compatibility. Yes, Sony screwed something up at launch time. Not only has the rest of the world to wait even longer for this overpowered behemoth those Japanese enthusiasts loyal enough to have bought a launch model have been greeted with some serious backwards compatibility issues with their favourite PS2 titles. IGN and Gamespy have published a shortlist of the titles with the most serious problems but apparently there are problems with 192 titles ranging from the screen being off-centre to audio glitches and even system crashes.

Sony claim that patches are in development but they have not given a time-frame for the availability of these fixes so in the meantime, those excited Japanese consumers will have to delay their "enhanced" play on the PS3 in favour of their old PS2s for their favourites until Sony get round to sorting the problem.

Meanwhile, here in Europe, around the time that the PS3 comes out I will, hopefully, have saved up enough to get a Nintendo Wii. Given Nintendo's track record, that might actually work with my old Gamecube games and will have the added advantage of not cluttering up my already messy room with another giant black box whick doesn't do what its supposed to.